The Handwriting

Star found the journals on the first cold Saturday of October, in the bottom drawer of an armoire nobody had opened since the house changed hands. The drawer stuck. She had to squat on the concrete floor of the basement and pull with both hands, and when it finally gave, cobwebs and dust pillowed into her face and made her cough.

There were four of them, leather-bound, different states of wear and different shades of brown. She briefly considered just throwing them in the garbage bag to go out with that week's trash, but what if they were blank and could be donated instead. She knew they weren't blank but she needed an excuse to open them, a reason to discover the contents inside. She sat down on the floor, the cold of the concrete felt through her leggings made her shiver, holding the anticipation she felt in her body. She crossed her legs and settled into a comfortable position and slowly opened one of the worn journals in her lap. She saw Desiree's name written inside the front cover, the looping of the D, given an extra curl at the bottom. She sat there for a long time, turning the pages and read until her legs went numb.

She had met Brian two years before the divorce was final, at the gym, on a Tuesday, over nothing more than a shared annoyance at someone not racking their weights when they were finished. She didn't like to think of that year in exact terms of the calendar, but she thought of it now, sitting on the concrete with someone else's marriage open in her lap.

Desiree never named him. That was the first thing Star noticed, and the thing that unsettled her most, more than what he did. Page after page, he came home at eleven and didn't say where he was and I stopped asking. He put his hand around the back of my neck the way you'd hold a puppy that had made a mess on the rug last time I asked him to explain himself. He hasn't been outright violent, but I am still scared and I have started sleeping with my shoes under my side of the bed. Always he. Always him. Never a name, as if writing it down might summon him into the room, or as if naming him might reveal something only she could know.

Star told herself this was none of her business, but in some way it was. She wondered if those nights he had come home late were the same ones where he had been with her. Her mind worked to make parallels and connect information while she carried the journals up from the basement, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag. She debated again about throwing them out, but it seemed important, another woman's fear, like a document of record that should be kept. She decided that they needed to be protected and safe until she knew what to do with them so she put them in the spare tire well of her Honda CRV, under the jack.

Star went back inside and proceeded to sweep the basement floor of the house Brian used to share with a woman he rarely mentioned. She continued her cleaning hap-hazardly, her mind continuously recounting the words she had read and she remained distracted well into the evening while she made dinner for her stepson who was, at that moment, forty-five minutes from home in a county jail holding cell for something involving a stranger's garage and a crowbar.

She read a little more whenever she could, it became a ritual for her. She taught an evening yoga class 2 nights a week and would often stay to talk to her students so no one was expecting her home right away. However, she started leaving immediately after class was over, driving to park near her house, sitting in the driver's seat with the dome light on, engine off, the cold coming up through the floor of the car. Devouring Desiree's words with the same appetite she used to have for dinner that time of evening.

There's someone else, I can tell by the way he acts and smells when he comes home at night, it's not quite the scent of another woman, but something is off, like his skin has been too close to someone else and their scent has rubbed off on him. I hate her more than I hate him, which doesn't make sense, since she didn't do anything to me. He did all of it.

Star read that one twice. Then she put the journal down on the passenger seat and sat with her hands on the wheel for a while, not ready to drive anywhere.

He says if I ever tell anyone what he's really like, he'll make sure no one believes me. He's right. No one would. He's so easy to love from the outside.

Easy to love from the outside. Star turned that sentence over in her mind the way you'd turn over a stone to see what was beneath it, she knew that something was there.

Brian was easy to love from the outside. That was true of him the way it was true of the house they now shared. Star had reservations about moving into the house he had built a family in with Desiree, but it was a beautiful shingled styled east coast marvel on a hill above the cliffside with a view of the ocean. Despite its external beauty, it was all rot on the inside, behind walls that still looked fine if you didn't know to check. He had a way of going quiet before he got angry, a held breath that lasted just slightly too long, and Star had spent two years learning to read the length of that breath the way sailors read the weather.

Devon came home from the county jail in the third week of October, thinner, with a court date and a curfew and a smell that made Star's stomach turn each time she walked past his room. He didn't speak to her except to ask where things were in the house since her clean-out and reorganization efforts. He spoke to his father in the clipped, furious shorthand of people who have said the real things already, years ago, and have nothing left for conversation other than contempt. Once, in the kitchen, Star heard Devon say it's like you have no idea what you did to us, Brian didn't respond, and she stood very still in the pantry with a can of tomatoes in her hand until they were both gone.

Star hadn't meant to go looking. She was only stripping his sheets, the ones that had sat unwashed since before he was arrested, when her hand caught the edge of something wedged between the mattress and the box spring. A fifth journal, thinner than the others, newer. The same looping D on the inside cover, but looser now, hurried in places, like it had been written fast. She sat on the edge of Devon's unmade bed with his mother's handwriting in her lap and did not let herself wonder yet why her stepson had it, or how long he'd had it, or what it meant that he'd kept it hidden, after all these pages held familiarity for her.

He still finds a way in. Tuesday and Thursday nights, while she is teaching class, he tells her that he is working late. I used to be the one wondering where he was. Now I'm the one he comes to instead.

Tuesday and Thursday. Her nights. The ones she used to spend with her students, until the park became the new place she went instead — sitting with these journals in her lap, feeling something for them she no longer felt for the man described in them.

Desiree was found on the twelfth of November, in the apartment she'd moved into after the divorce, by Devon, who had gone over to ask for money. The county called her death what they call anything where they don't know what to say or else won't say, it was pending investigation.

Star thought about the nights that Brian had not come home until very late and refused to discuss it with her. The nights she had laid awake in bed listening to the silence of the house, waiting anxiously to hear the car on the gravel driveway outside or the squeaky hinges of the side door, not knowing if it would be Brian or Devon that had finally come home, she feared them both for the same reason. She recounted her memories of that first day she discovered the journals in the basement, he came home at eleven. She did not ask him about any of it, then or after. She didn't ask about the contents of the box, the discovery inside the fifth journal, the word him. She was aware, distantly, that this not-asking had become a kind of architecture she was living inside, like the foundational load-bearing walls of their house, holding something up that she didn't look at too closely, not wanting to see what was actually degrading underneath.

At the funeral, Brian cried the way men who are unused to it cry, abruptly, then furious with themselves for it. Devon didn't cry at all. He stood at the edge of the grass, away from his family, in a jacket too thin for a late afternoon in November with the east coast cold. He stared at his father the entire time, not at the minister or the casket, just straight at his father the way you'd watch a door you expected someone to come through.

Afterward, Star drove home alone. She had told Brian she needed air. She took the long way, settling into the twists and turns of the coastal road, feeling like they were a metaphor for her recent life experiences. Once the sun had set and the sky was getting dark, she stopped her CRV on the shoulder where no one could see her from the road, popped the hatch, removed the cover and reached into the spare tire well for the grocery bag.

She opened the bag, and searched quickly for the journal she was looking for. It was thinner and less worn than the others, half-used, the later pages blank, waiting. She had been adding to it for three weeks by then, a few lines at a time in her car at the park, in a hand she had practiced until the loop on the D came without thinking. It was, she told herself, a kind of writing exercise. A way of finishing a sentence someone else had started and wasn't able to finish.

She read the last entry once, under the dome light, to be sure the ink had dried evenly and the tense held. He knows I found the letters. He said if I ever try to leave he'll make sure it looks like something else. I'm not scared of him anymore. I'm scared of what I'll have to do first.

She closed the journal, put it back with the others, under the jack, replaced the cover and shut the hatch. As she continued her drive home to make dinner, she thought of all the cleaning she'd done this fall, the things she'd discarded, the ones she'd kept, and what had yet to surface.